Curtains, food shopping and staying grey

Peppers ready for the freezer - a bargain at the greengrocers

A Red Admiral found in the greenhouse

'Small' carrots pulled from the garden for Sunday dinner - the taste was just so good.

The curtain alteration is finished - hooray!  I will confess they very, very nearly got the better of me and I did a lot more than just mutter about the quality.  I have worked on those curtains for almost three days solid; everything else went by the way, and it required more patience and perseverance than I thought I possessed, so to say I am relieved they are done is a bit of an understatement LOL.  And so we move on.

We don't 'do' the commercialism of Valentine's Day - no cards, chocolates or flowers here - but N likes an excuse to mess around in the kitchen and we had a lovely meal of Indian-style tapas which he had made from scratch, including some delicious pitta bread.  I doubt we'd have got a starter in a restaurant for the price he spent on the whole meal - just another reason I love him so much ;-)))

We caught up with the final programme in the Eat Well For Less series and whilst I have been just slightly stunned by the way some people shop for food, there have been one or two interesting snippets we've picked up on.  Fruit juice from concentrate, for example, has exactly the same ingredients as 'pure' fruit juice.  Meat from a butcher is better quality than from a supermarket, and often cheaper.  Fresh produce, cut up and washed then packed in bags, has a very short shelf life.  Cooking from scratch is cheaper and of course you know what goes into it.  Use a meal plan and shop with a list.  Only buy what you know you are going to use, and don't get side-tracked  by so-called bargains.  The amount of money that some people spend on food for one week is double what we spend for a month.  And we eat very well indeed.  It was staggering.

I'm still pondering the wardrobe/clothing situation.  The randomness of my clothes has been a bit of a shock; absolutely no plan at all.  I think some of that may have been due to wearing a uniform for much of my working life, so I only needed to throw casuals on when I got home.  Also I know I used to buy sale goods (in fact I don't think anything in my wardrobe was full price) because they were a 'good buy', not because they went with anything else.  And such a lot of colour, which I love, but not much to tone any of it down a little.  Many, many years ago (probably over 25, thinking about it) I had my colours done ('Colour Me Beautiful' I believe) and I took my little colour charts very much to heart.  So all the colours are the right colours, just way too many of them!  And it was a long time ago.  And now I have grey hair . . .  Just before Christmas I had a wobble about being grey, and convinced myself I needed to dye my hair again, but with a bit of time, and some perspective, I realise that it's what I wear that's the problem, not the colour of my hair.  I just cannot face, or justify, the time and money to have my hair coloured, not to mention the chemicals involved, and I'm relieved that, as so often happens, I have worked my way through the problem.  So grey hair is what I have and grey hair is what I will stick with.  Authenticity rules!!  The clothing declutter has brought into the open one or two other issues which have been 'cluttering up' my life for a while, and I suspect there is a connection at some deeper level.  I'm not saying a radical revamp of my wardrobe is going to sort everything out, but I am quietly confident that it is a place to start.